United States
![Susie Yang - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B08BXBLRWK.jpg)
White Ivy: A Novel
"A truly addictive read" (Glamour) about how a young woman's crush on a privileged former classmate becomes a story of love, lies, and dark obsession, offering stark insights into the immigrant experience, as it hurtles to its electrifying ending in this "twisty, unputdownable, psychological thriller" (People).
Ivy Lin is a thief and a liar-but you'd never know it by looking at her.
Raised outside of Boston, Ivy's immigrant grandmother relies on Ivy's mild appearance for cover as she teaches her granddaughter how to pilfer items from yard sales and second-hand shops. Thieving allows Ivy to accumulate the trappings of a suburban teen-and, most importantly, to attract the attention of Gideon Speyer, the golden boy of a wealthy political family. But when Ivy's mother discovers her trespasses, punishment is swift and Ivy is sent to China, and her dream instantly evaporates.
Years later, Ivy has grown into a poised yet restless young woman, haunted by her conflicting feelings about her upbringing and her family. Back in Boston, when Ivy bumps into Sylvia Speyer, Gideon's sister, a reconnection with Gideon seems not only inevitable-it feels like fate.
Slowly, Ivy sinks her claws into Gideon and the entire Speyer clan by attending fancy dinners, and weekend getaways to the cape. But just as Ivy is about to have everything she's ever wanted, a ghost from her past resurfaces, threatening the nearly perfect life she's worked so hard to build.
Filled with surprising twists and a nuanced exploration of class and race, White Ivy is a "highly entertaining," (The Washington Post) "propulsive debut" (San Francisco Chronicle) that offers a glimpse into the dark side of a woman who yearns for success at any cost.
Ivy Lin is a thief and a liar-but you'd never know it by looking at her.
Raised outside of Boston, Ivy's immigrant grandmother relies on Ivy's mild appearance for cover as she teaches her granddaughter how to pilfer items from yard sales and second-hand shops. Thieving allows Ivy to accumulate the trappings of a suburban teen-and, most importantly, to attract the attention of Gideon Speyer, the golden boy of a wealthy political family. But when Ivy's mother discovers her trespasses, punishment is swift and Ivy is sent to China, and her dream instantly evaporates.
Years later, Ivy has grown into a poised yet restless young woman, haunted by her conflicting feelings about her upbringing and her family. Back in Boston, when Ivy bumps into Sylvia Speyer, Gideon's sister, a reconnection with Gideon seems not only inevitable-it feels like fate.
Slowly, Ivy sinks her claws into Gideon and the entire Speyer clan by attending fancy dinners, and weekend getaways to the cape. But just as Ivy is about to have everything she's ever wanted, a ghost from her past resurfaces, threatening the nearly perfect life she's worked so hard to build.
Filled with surprising twists and a nuanced exploration of class and race, White Ivy is a "highly entertaining," (The Washington Post) "propulsive debut" (San Francisco Chronicle) that offers a glimpse into the dark side of a woman who yearns for success at any cost.
Editorial Reviews
Named one of the Best Books of 2020 by USA Today (4 Stars) | one of the Most Anticipated Books by Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine, Time Magazine, Glamour, Vogue, The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, ABC News, Bustle, Lit Hub, Newsday, The Millions, Town & Country, Refinery 29, Shondaland, Crime Reads
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize
"A twisty, unputdownable psychological thriller. Clear your schedule." - People, Book of the Week
"A truly addictive read." - Glamour
"There's nothing better than a novel with an unpredictable plot. And White Ivy, Susie Yang's debut novel... is exactly that." - USA Today (4 out of 4 stars)
"White Ivy is an enthralling, thrill of a book. It is fascinating to spend time inside Ivy's mind, unique and unapologetic in its bold (and often bad) decisions. A story of many cultures both clashing and converging, White Ivy's many twists and turns will surprise you until the very last page." - Molly Sprayregen, Associated Press
"Susie Yang delves into class warfare and deceit in the season's biggest debut" - Entertainment Weekly
"The genius of White Ivy is that each plot point of the romance is fulfilled but also undercut by a traumatic pratfall, described in language as bright and scarring as a wound." - The Los Angeles Times
"The modern story of clashing cultures and classes already reads like Crazy Rich Asians meets Donna Tartt's A Secret History meets Paul's Case, Willa Cather's classic story of a desperate middle-class climb. But White Ivy, the propulsive debut novel by Susie Yang, is more than plot twists and love triangles. It's also an astute chronicle of cultures, gender dynamics and the complicated business of self-creation in America." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Susie Yang's White Ivy cleverly overturns the 'model minority' stereotype with a deliciously twisty story that will leave you breathless." - Real Simple
"A highly entertaining, well-plotted character study about a young woman whose obsession with the shallow signifiers of success gets her in too deep." - The Washington Post
"Yang excels at drawing sharp characters, making excruciating observations about class, family, and social norms, and painting the losses of migration and struggles Asians and other immigrants face in America. An easy page-turner... the cutting prose movingly portrays many layers of tribulation and traumas, and marks Yang as a voice to watch." - Bo...
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize
"A twisty, unputdownable psychological thriller. Clear your schedule." - People, Book of the Week
"A truly addictive read." - Glamour
"There's nothing better than a novel with an unpredictable plot. And White Ivy, Susie Yang's debut novel... is exactly that." - USA Today (4 out of 4 stars)
"White Ivy is an enthralling, thrill of a book. It is fascinating to spend time inside Ivy's mind, unique and unapologetic in its bold (and often bad) decisions. A story of many cultures both clashing and converging, White Ivy's many twists and turns will surprise you until the very last page." - Molly Sprayregen, Associated Press
"Susie Yang delves into class warfare and deceit in the season's biggest debut" - Entertainment Weekly
"The genius of White Ivy is that each plot point of the romance is fulfilled but also undercut by a traumatic pratfall, described in language as bright and scarring as a wound." - The Los Angeles Times
"The modern story of clashing cultures and classes already reads like Crazy Rich Asians meets Donna Tartt's A Secret History meets Paul's Case, Willa Cather's classic story of a desperate middle-class climb. But White Ivy, the propulsive debut novel by Susie Yang, is more than plot twists and love triangles. It's also an astute chronicle of cultures, gender dynamics and the complicated business of self-creation in America." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Susie Yang's White Ivy cleverly overturns the 'model minority' stereotype with a deliciously twisty story that will leave you breathless." - Real Simple
"A highly entertaining, well-plotted character study about a young woman whose obsession with the shallow signifiers of success gets her in too deep." - The Washington Post
"Yang excels at drawing sharp characters, making excruciating observations about class, family, and social norms, and painting the losses of migration and struggles Asians and other immigrants face in America. An easy page-turner... the cutting prose movingly portrays many layers of tribulation and traumas, and marks Yang as a voice to watch." - Bo...
Readers Top Reviews
Clare in KentLGKasK
I read this book because it was recommended on one of the books of 2020 lists. Totally unrealistic, including about China and Chinese families. I haven’t read a Mills & Boon since I was a teenager but this is undoubtedly one. A book for reading whilst lying on a sun lounger, sipping on a cocktail.
F Todd
Once I started White Ivy it was very hard to put down- always the sign of a good book! The author does a great job at constructing interesting and three dimensional characters- flawed in recognisable and very human ways. The protagonist is very much an anti-hero, not something I always enjoy but in this case done to perfection. It also cleverly captures many aspects of US society - especially the experiences of immigration, belonging and perceptions of wealth and happiness. Very impressive first novel!
DomeniqueCYMargaret
WHAT?!? I am giving it one star because it is a terrible novel, but maybe I should have given it five because it so captured my attention. I have so many thoughts, some of which are controversial. So this might be a controversial post. 1)First this book is filled with the "simple and cheaps." For example (and not limited to): Roux Roman is Romanian!? Gideon and Sylvia Speyer may or may not be flowers-in-the-attic-ing or Gideon and Tom have a sexual-separate-peace! (For a straight-laced dude as he is presented he sure has a lot of innuendo'd sexual kinks, but not Asian women, or maybe?) Are the Speyers poor or Protestant or both or neither? Murder in the White Mountains! Cattahasset is such a magical cape place so much so it doesn’t even exist. I can't think of any Delaware, Iroquois, or Algonquin word that is even related to this, but okay... They demolished Clarksville in the 1980's to build Quakerbridge Mall. 2) For the more deeper thoughts: So as the novel progresses, Ivy "Bluest Eye's" herself, going definitely insane because of her inferiority complex to the world she aspires to be a part of...Though the boundaries of this world are really unclear... it seems she wants everything and also nothing...though she actually has a lot, and wants things that many would not find desirable... ... ... or maybe it's all just scurvy? (SERIOUSLY THIS HAPPENS) There have been a number of novels in the last few years describing the experience of Asian-American immigrants in the latter half of the 20th century. Never was one so just...wow... I am not Asian American...though I come from another Title 9 class, so I get there can in certain situations where one can feel disenfranchised in a variety of ways. I would never equate my experience though, as anything similar to any group of people systematically discriminated against or struggling against income and market inequalities. But, like, Ivy seems to think she is the latter when really her parents do fairly well by her...bringing her to the US...working hard to send her to private school...feeding and clothing her. Her education is quite enviable (allusions to some girls liberal arts college), and her career though not illustrious is sustaining (private school elementary teacher). Anyhow they took the good-ole "New England outsider wants to become insider", but with an incredibly thin veneer of research, and wrote a salacious romance novel. I love reading it because I couldn’t tell whether the joke was on me, a lover of New England based stories, the cast (again Roux Roman is Romanian?!) or the author herself (because in no way is this a good representation of any canon or other than "Beach Reads").
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1 1
IVY LIN WAS A THIEF but you would never know it to look at her. Maybe that was the problem. No one ever suspected-and that made her reckless. Her features were so average and nondescript that the brain only needed a split second to develop a complete understanding of her: skinny Asian girl, quiet, overly docile around adults in uniforms. She had a way of walking, shoulders forward, chin tucked under, arms barely swinging, that rendered her invisible in the way of pigeons and janitors.
Ivy would have traded her face a thousand times over for a blue-eyed, blond-haired version like the Satterfield twins, or even a redheaded, freckly version like Liza Johnson, instead of her own Chinese one with its too-thin lips, embarrassingly high forehead, two fleshy cheeks like ripe apples before the autumn pickings. Because of those cheeks, at fourteen years old, she was often mistaken for an elementary school student-an unfortunate hindrance in everything except thieving, in which her childlike looks were a useful camouflage.
Ivy's only source of vanity was her eyes. They were pleasingly round, symmetrically situated, cocoa brown in color, with crescent corners dipped in like the ends of a stuffed dumpling. Her grandmother had trimmed her lashes when she was a baby to "stimulate growth," and it seemed to have worked, for now she was blessed with a flurry of thick, black lashes that other girls could only achieve with copious layers of mascara, and not even then. By any standard, she had nice eyes-but especially for a Chinese girl-and they saved her from an otherwise plain face.
So how exactly had this unassuming, big-eyed girl come to thieving? In the same way water trickles into even the tiniest cracks between boulders, her personality had formed into crooked shapes around the hard structure of her Chinese upbringing.
When Ivy was two years old, her parents immigrated to the United States and left her in the care of her maternal grandmother, Meifeng, in their hometown of Chongqing. Of her next three years in China, she remembered very little except one vivid memory of pressing her face into the scratchy fibers of her grandmother's coat, shouting, "You tricked me! You tricked me!" after she realized Meifeng had abandoned her to the care of a neighbor to take an extra clerical shift. Even then, Ivy had none of the undiscerning friendliness of other children; her love was passionate but singular, complete devotion or none at all.
When Ivy turned five, Nan and Shen Lin had finally saved enough money to send for their daughter. "You'll go and live in a wonderful state in America," Meifeng told her, "called Ma-sa-zhu-sai." She'd seen the photographs her parents mailed home, pastoral scenes of ponds, square lawns, blue skies, trees that only bloomed vibrant pink and fuchsia flowers, which her pale-cheeked mother, whom she could no longer remember, was always holding by thin branches that resembled the sticks of sugared plums Ivy ate on New Year's. All this caused much excitement for the journey-she adored taking trips with her grandmother-but at the last minute, after handing Ivy off to a smartly dressed flight attendant with fascinating gold buttons on her vest, Meifeng disappeared into the airport crowd.
Ivy threw up on the airplane and cried nearly the entire flight. Upon landing at Logan Airport, she howled as the flight attendant pushed her toward two Asian strangers waiting at the gate with a screaming baby no larger than the daikon radishes she used to help Meifeng pull out of their soil, crusty smears all over his clenched white fists. Ivy dragged her feet, tripped over a shoelace, and landed on her knees.
"Stand up now," said the man, offering his hand. The woman continued to rock the baby. She addressed her husband in a weary tone. "Where are her suitcases?"
Ivy wiped her face and took the man's hand. She had already intuited that tears would have no place with these brick-faced people, so different from the gregarious aunties in China who'd coax her with a fresh box of chalk or White Rabbit taffies should she display the slightest sign of displeasure.
This became Ivy's earliest memory of her family: Shen Lin's hard, calloused fingers over her own, his particular scent of tobacco and minty toothpaste; the clear winter light flitting in through the floor-to-ceiling windows beyond which airplanes were taking off and landing; her brother, Austin, no more than a little sack in smelly diapers in Nan's arms. Walking among them but not one of them, Ivy felt a queer, disso...
IVY LIN WAS A THIEF but you would never know it to look at her. Maybe that was the problem. No one ever suspected-and that made her reckless. Her features were so average and nondescript that the brain only needed a split second to develop a complete understanding of her: skinny Asian girl, quiet, overly docile around adults in uniforms. She had a way of walking, shoulders forward, chin tucked under, arms barely swinging, that rendered her invisible in the way of pigeons and janitors.
Ivy would have traded her face a thousand times over for a blue-eyed, blond-haired version like the Satterfield twins, or even a redheaded, freckly version like Liza Johnson, instead of her own Chinese one with its too-thin lips, embarrassingly high forehead, two fleshy cheeks like ripe apples before the autumn pickings. Because of those cheeks, at fourteen years old, she was often mistaken for an elementary school student-an unfortunate hindrance in everything except thieving, in which her childlike looks were a useful camouflage.
Ivy's only source of vanity was her eyes. They were pleasingly round, symmetrically situated, cocoa brown in color, with crescent corners dipped in like the ends of a stuffed dumpling. Her grandmother had trimmed her lashes when she was a baby to "stimulate growth," and it seemed to have worked, for now she was blessed with a flurry of thick, black lashes that other girls could only achieve with copious layers of mascara, and not even then. By any standard, she had nice eyes-but especially for a Chinese girl-and they saved her from an otherwise plain face.
So how exactly had this unassuming, big-eyed girl come to thieving? In the same way water trickles into even the tiniest cracks between boulders, her personality had formed into crooked shapes around the hard structure of her Chinese upbringing.
When Ivy was two years old, her parents immigrated to the United States and left her in the care of her maternal grandmother, Meifeng, in their hometown of Chongqing. Of her next three years in China, she remembered very little except one vivid memory of pressing her face into the scratchy fibers of her grandmother's coat, shouting, "You tricked me! You tricked me!" after she realized Meifeng had abandoned her to the care of a neighbor to take an extra clerical shift. Even then, Ivy had none of the undiscerning friendliness of other children; her love was passionate but singular, complete devotion or none at all.
When Ivy turned five, Nan and Shen Lin had finally saved enough money to send for their daughter. "You'll go and live in a wonderful state in America," Meifeng told her, "called Ma-sa-zhu-sai." She'd seen the photographs her parents mailed home, pastoral scenes of ponds, square lawns, blue skies, trees that only bloomed vibrant pink and fuchsia flowers, which her pale-cheeked mother, whom she could no longer remember, was always holding by thin branches that resembled the sticks of sugared plums Ivy ate on New Year's. All this caused much excitement for the journey-she adored taking trips with her grandmother-but at the last minute, after handing Ivy off to a smartly dressed flight attendant with fascinating gold buttons on her vest, Meifeng disappeared into the airport crowd.
Ivy threw up on the airplane and cried nearly the entire flight. Upon landing at Logan Airport, she howled as the flight attendant pushed her toward two Asian strangers waiting at the gate with a screaming baby no larger than the daikon radishes she used to help Meifeng pull out of their soil, crusty smears all over his clenched white fists. Ivy dragged her feet, tripped over a shoelace, and landed on her knees.
"Stand up now," said the man, offering his hand. The woman continued to rock the baby. She addressed her husband in a weary tone. "Where are her suitcases?"
Ivy wiped her face and took the man's hand. She had already intuited that tears would have no place with these brick-faced people, so different from the gregarious aunties in China who'd coax her with a fresh box of chalk or White Rabbit taffies should she display the slightest sign of displeasure.
This became Ivy's earliest memory of her family: Shen Lin's hard, calloused fingers over her own, his particular scent of tobacco and minty toothpaste; the clear winter light flitting in through the floor-to-ceiling windows beyond which airplanes were taking off and landing; her brother, Austin, no more than a little sack in smelly diapers in Nan's arms. Walking among them but not one of them, Ivy felt a queer, disso...
